Why U.S. Energy Independence Is a 9/11 Legacy

Transcript generated automatically from the video and lightly corrected. It may contain errors.

25 years ago this morning, 2,977 people were killed. 2,753 in New York, 184 at the Pentagon, 40 in a field outside Shanksville, Pennsylvania. 343 of them were firefighters who were walking up a building while everybody else was walking down. That is the commemoration. I'm not going to try to improve it, and I'm not going to use it as a runway into something else. What I can do is the thing this program exists to do, which is describe what changed and what is still changing as precisely as I can.

I'm Joseph Soares. I served in Canada's Prime Minister's Office during the 2008 financial crisis, and as a chief of staff in the Senate of Canada during the 2020 pandemic. On September 11th, 2001, I was a junior staff in Minister of Transport David Collenette's office here in Ottawa. This is the Corridor Intelligence.

Start with a number that reframes the whole question. Roughly 103 million Americans were born after that morning. That is more than a quarter of the country. On the whole, about 31% of the United States population is under 25. So, for something close to a third of the country, the 11th of September is not a memory, it is history. It is a chapter, the way D-Day is a chapter for me. They did not lose anything that day because they weren't there to lose it, and they inherited the results anyway.

That matters for a specific reason. If you remember it, you tend to explain the last 25 years in terms of how it felt. If you do not remember it, you need it explained in terms of what it built. And the second explanation is the more useful one because the things it built are still in operation.

So, what do people think changed? Airports to wars, a security apparatus. All true, and all of it is the part that is easiest to see and easiest to date. The wars have a price tag that has been carefully counted. Brown University's Costs of War project estimates the total cost of the post-9/11 wars at about $8 trillion. Roughly 5.8 trillion in appropriations plus a minimum of 2.2 trillion in care owed to the veterans of those wars over the decades ahead. And here is the detail inside that number that tells you something. More than $1 trillion of it has already gone to interest because the whole thing was funded with debt. According to the project's own projection, by 2030, the United States will have spent as much on servicing the debt from those wars as it spent on the operations themselves.

But the wars ended. The airports are just an inconvenience now, and neither of those is the durable part. Two things outlasted the emergency, and between them, they explain a great deal of what American posture looks like this week.

The first is a financial instrument. Before 2001, the United States had sanctions in place and had them for decades. What it did not have in this form was a routine administrative power to reach into the global banking system and remove a specific institution from it. The US Patriot Act, passed weeks after the attacks, broadens the Bank Secrecy Act and put the financing of terrorism at the center of it. Inside that act, Section 311 gave the Secretary of the Treasury the authority to find that a foreign jurisdiction, a foreign financial institution, a class of transaction, or a type of account is of primary money laundering concern. And then to require American financial institutions to take special measures against it. Read what that actually does. It does not seize anything. It does not require a court. It makes the rest of the banking system unwilling to touch you. In a world where cross-border trade settles in US dollars, being cut off from the dollar is not a sanction in the old sense. It is closer to being unplugged.

Then in April 2004, Treasury Secretary John Snow signed the order creating the Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence. Congress later codified it in title 31, section 312 of the US code. That step is the one people skip, and it is the important one. 2001 produced the power. 2004 gave that power a permanent home, a budget line, a leadership post, and a career path. Powers that get an office do not hand it back.

Now, look at what the instrument is used for today. This week, Iran moved to formalize a maritime zone in the Gulf, under which vessels transiting it are placed on a sanctions list. Washington has designated, listed, and struck tankers under a stated tit-for-tat doctrine. A named Canadian company was threatened directly. Canadian firms were ordered to be stripped from the Kermit schedules that carry more than 50 billion dollars a year in United States government purchasing, and an outright import ban on Canadian alcohol, whey, and motorcycles was enacted under section 338 of a tariff act passed in 1930. Yes, you did hear me, 1930. None of that is counterterrorism. Not one item on that list. But, it's the same machinery. The habit of reaching for the financial system first, of acting by designation and administrative finding, rather than by treaty or tribunal. Of treating access to the dollar as a lever. That habit was built between 2001 and 2004 for a reason everybody accepted at the time. And, it is now simply the way business gets done.

That is the observation. And, I want to be careful to leave it at that. An observation. I am not telling you whether that is good or bad. I'm telling you it is a pattern. And, the pattern is consistent. A state that discovers a capability under emergency conditions retains it after the emergency ends. And, then finds new uses for it. That is not an American characteristic. It is an institutional one. Every government does it, including mine.

The second thing that outlived the emergency is a position, not a power, energy. In 2001, the United States produced about 5.9 million barrels of crude a day and imported heavily to cover the rest. Imports would go on to peak at nearly 15 million barrels per day in 2005. In 2025, American crude production hit a record of about 13.6 million barrels per day. The country has been a net petroleum exporter since 2020. And, last year the gap widened to 2.8 million barrels per day. About 10.7 million exported against 7.9 million imported. So, that is a different country standing in the same gulf. A state that imports its oil and a state that exports it do not behave the same. Certainly not when a checkpoint gets contested. That is not a moral difference. It is a structural one. Exposure shapes posture and the exposure inverted over exactly the same 25 years.

So, put the two together because that is the whole argument. Posture is capability plus exposure. Over 1/4 century, the United States acquired a financial instrument it did not previously have and shed an energy dependency it could not previously escape. Neither of those was announced as a strategic turn. One was a counterterrorism measure. The other was a drilling technique. And that is why explaining current American behavior purely in terms of who holds office or what was said last week keeps producing poor forecasts. The behavior rests on a capability set and an exposure profile that took 25 years to assemble and does not change with an election. So, for the generation that has no memory of that morning, that is the inheritance, not the footage.

So, what am I watching now? Well, whether the instrument keeps widening. Every use of a designation power against a target unrelated to the terrorism sets a precedent and precedent is what these powers run on. Whether other states finish building their counterparts. An exclusion zone that sanctions ships for transiting a strait is the same logic pointed the other way. And once two systems can unplug each other, the cost of using either goes up. And whether the energy position holds. It is the quieter of the two and the one that would change American behavior fastest if it moved. Count the years. Name the instrument. Watch what it does next. I'm Joseph Soares for Corridor Intelligence.